Things that have no true existence.

“The sweet work of repentance
that is set before us as followers of Christ,
is nothing other than the return to reality.”

“How we feel about many things has this same make-believe quality. We find certain styles of clothing and certain products (cars, houses, etc.) attractive and desirable, but often with little more than subjective reasons for our desires. The power of this make-believe is so great that it is well-known that many people “go shopping” to battle depression. It is a strange therapy.”

Read the rest of the article by Father Stephen Freeman here: “The Unreal Land” — about the real cause of so much of our grief and misery in everyday life, “a ceaseless struggle with things that have no true existence.”

When I look around his blog I always find plenty to provoke my thoughts in a good direction. His book Everywhere Present puts a lot of this food for the soul together in one nourishing bowl.

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3 thoughts on “Things that have no true existence.”

“The return to reality” – Leila Lawler said something in her blog post the other day, “reality itself is cause for joy”, and it really struck me. Lent is approaching, and I always feel the more we can try and strip ourselves from the extraneous things, the closer to reality we will get. But it can be scary.

I’ve never understood “shopping as therapy,” lol. I’m going through a bout of depression and I find the only thing that helps is the “reality” of Jesus. I’m happiest when talking to Him; thinking about Him; reading His word. So many things distract us. This world is constantly abuzz. I’m glad I’m in a time in my life when I can stop and sit quietly with the Lord. 🙂

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George Bernard Shaw said, "Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life."

I apologize for the way all these categories (and now that I'm on WordPress we have tags as well) are so mixed up and crude. There's always the Search box if you need it.

There are two kinds of writers: smart ones and dumb ones. The smart kind write what they know. The dumb ones write in order to know. I am one of the dumb ones. -Lewis B. Smedes

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If you want to read the posts about my seven weeks inIndia in chronological order, start with this post. Otherwise, you can click on the tag “India” and all the posts with that tag will display, most recent first.